Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/156

 She certainly protested against the charge with great vehemence, and to-day, as if to prove her innocence of it, she was dressed, in contrast to all the other girls, in a plain dark green linsey dress without a bit of trimming or finery of any kind.

She looked well all the same—it was not for nothing that she was reckoned among the prettiest girls in the village; although the lower part of the face was childishly unformed, and a little out of proportion to the upper part, with the closely growing, dark eyebrows, and deep-set, earnest eyes. She sat with her usual almost unnaturally erect bearing, which gave to her trim little figure an air of self-confidence and power; and she neither took part in, nor listened to the gay chatter going on among the women round her. This want of sympathy with her surroundings was such an old story with her, that it no longer caused astonishment to any one. Even as a child, people had been amused by the comical "stand-off" air with which she met all advances of strangers, friendly or unfriendly. Her reserve had become more pronounced after she had been at a High School a few years ago; and while there, she had taken part in a "Friendly Meeting" in Copenhagen, where, among others, old Bishop Grundtvig spoke for the last time. Since then she had not been seen much outside her father's house and fields, more especially keeping away from the somewhat free and easy pleasures, in which the youth of the village indulged on